Although she was unsure of Chafee’s support, “I could not bring myself to walk away from our team. … I just could not give up the chance we had to bring about real change in Rhode Island,” Gist wrote in her 190-page doctoral dissertation, which had been under embargo since she completed it in 2012. A Journal reporter read a copy of the work this week after the embargo expired.

“I’m a big believer in listening to my instincts,” Gist said Thursday in an interview about her work. “Too often, people move from place to place when it’s professionally convenient.”

A different picture of Gist emerges in her dissertation, “An Ocean State Voyage: A Leadership Case Study for the Creation of an Evaluation System with and for Teachers.”

Critics have painted Gist as a leader who surrounded herself with like-minded thinkers. But the leader she describes in these pages wants nothing more than the trust of her staff and Rhode Island’s teachers. In fact, she talks about creating a work environment built around love, a place “full of joy where people laugh and have fun.”

She also says a good leader must display resolve in the face of criticism:

“A leader,” she wrote, “must be willing to risk the disdain of those we serve and work with in order to tackle…challenges.

“Taking on a leadership role requires courage,” Gist says. “Speaking up…going against the team to raise a problem, intervening when something is wrong — all require courage.”

Gist began her dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania when she came to Rhode Island in summer 2009. The work does much more than recount the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation model. It opens a window into the thoughts of a leader who has been perceived as distant and sometimes dogmatic.

Gist arrived in Rhode Island with an idealist’s belief that educators would share her vision for radical transformation. The first thing she told her staff was, “Are you ready to change the world?”

Always the elementary teacher, Gist left a mint on every staff member’s chair.

“I wanted our team to see themselves as part of something big,” Gist writes.

But what she found, she said, was a culture that valued being average, not exceptional.

“I had never encountered a situation,” she said Thursday, “where people really reacted negatively to the question: Who are the unsung heroes” in this department?

It wasn’t long before Gist had her first battle with the teachers unions. In February 2010, Central Falls School Supt. Frances Gallo fired every high school teacher after reaching a stalemate with the union over wide-ranging reforms. Gist supported Gallo.

Gist called the terminations “the greatest challenge for me personally and professionally” during her first two years in office. Fueled by this distrust, an April 2010 forum on a federal Race to the Top grant turned into an angry anti-Gist rally.

Gist says, “My support for Gallo’s decision damaged my credibility with many of our teachers.”

During her second year, Rhode Island won a $75-million federal Race to the Top grant. One of the critical pieces was a much more rigorous teacher evaluation. As Gist visited schools, teachers strongly objected to linking evaluations to student performance.

Although critics accused Gist of living in a bubble, in her dissertation, she portrays herself as acutely aware that the rank-and-file union members don’t trust her, despite repeated efforts to include them in creating the evaluation.

Gist says she was trying to undo an “inaccurate caricature that had been growing about me as a leader who didn’t respect teachers.”

She also describes her initially rocky relationship with Governor Chafee, who was skeptical about her educational vision.

“Privately, my conversations with Chafee, beginning with the first regarding Central Falls High School and including a later lunch meeting, had not gone well,” she writes.

Before Chafee’s inauguration in 2011, Gist told the governor that she would only stay with his support, yet she says she never received a commitment from Chafee nor the Board of Regents.

Because of this uncertainty, Gist began entertaining job offers, one of which was “very desirable.”

Ultimately, Gist decided to stay.

Almost a year to the day after the Central Falls’ terminations, the the Providence School Board approved Mayor Taveras’ decision to fire all the city’s teachers due to a financial crisis. Gist says it was “widely rumored” that she was behind the firings, which she denies.

Again, teachers saw Gist as the enemy.

Gist writes with surprising candor about the way in which events beyond her control threatened to derail her reforms. After a private meeting with Chafee and Gist, liberal commentator Diane Ravitch accused Gist of dominating the conversation and demanded an apology.

Gist declined, saying the meeting was cordial. But it only added to the mounting distrust between teachers and the commissioner.

“The person Ravitch described easily fit into the caricature of the unkind, disrespectful commissioner that was still believed by many to be me,” Gist writes. “But it opened up my now-strong relationship with the governor.”

While the teachers unions painted Gist as someone who didn’t respond to their concerns, Gist says she was more than willing to compromise. She delayed implementing the new evaluations for a year and she backed away from making student performance count toward 51 percent of the evaluation.

In her conclusion, Gist says, “I have experienced big wins and made mistakes. …I have been loved and hated, celebrated and feared. I will move forward with our work with a new tool to center me in the midst of the chaos: love, inquiry and grit.”